With their innovative concept for designing a smart kitchen, four students of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design (PolyU Design) have recently won the Best Design Team Award at the Collaborative Innovation Design Workshop held during the fourth International Art & Design Academic Month organized by Tsinghua University.

The PolyU Design team competed against six other teams, which came from Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University, School of Design of National Yunlin University of Science and Technology of Taiwan, Department of Industrial Product Design of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, and other three universities in China.

The workshop brief was to design an integrated concept for family kitchen which caters for Chinese lifestyle. The PolyU Design team designed “A Smart Kitchen On-demand”, which is set up to cater for the needs of modern Chinese cooking and dining behaviors. It is designed to enhance the value of the kitchen in a family, providing a platform to communicate, share and show caring. The design provides a solution making kitchen no longer a fixed space at home but part of the living room.

The PolyU Design team, consisted of four year three students of Industrial & Product Design, won the award for their outstanding performance of teamwork and design concept. “We are very excited and surprised to win the award from this large-scale design workshop, where other teams were highly professional and some of them were formed by master’s students,” Jack Chun Yueng -chiu, one of the members of the PolyU Design team said. The team was led by Mr Fred Han, Assistant Professor of PolyU Design, other team members included Yan Hei Ho, Tung Ting Kan and Bao Bo.

“We noticed that most people do not enjoy cooking at all,” Jack Chun explained. “We hope to design an environmentally friendly kitchen system, which could turn cooking into a joyful experience and at the same time, act as health consultant and cooking process assistant.”

The workshop and the fourth International Art & Design Academic Month was held from 10 to 14 December 2012 in Guangzhou, China.

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